Dry

Let’s get one thing straight, right from the start: This is not about desire. I am not writing about necessity. It is not about addiction. It is not even about excess. This is not because I have to, but because I choose to.

New Year’s Day and I felt empty. I felt turned inside out. I had been slightly sick and I had horrific diarrhoea, the sort that flushes you through until all that is left is a hollow husk. Feeling drained, I had been unable to get up properly.
I’d done small things, like taken a shower, then been a little more ill and then needed to lie down to recuperate. As I lay somewhat feebly on my girlfriend’s sofa with my head on her lap and the burble of the television somewhere behind my closed eyelids, I felt embarrassed; embarrassed and guilty because I knew that my patheticness would mean that we failed to meet some of her friends. By the time I was confident there was nothing left to come, it was too late. By the time we arrived at the pub in Old Street they had already left and it was all my fault.

But, contrary your expectations, I did not have a hang-over.

Oh, all right. Maybe a little one. When I first awoke there was a dehydrated crinkle to my brain, but it faded quickly enough. I’d drunk a fair bit the night before, but not to excess. Not like I used to. I hadn’t felt drunk as we’d walked home through the damp shadowed streets of West London. I’d consumed probably less than I had on many a Friday night over the years after which I would have sprung out of bed with ease on a Saturday morning. No, honestly. I wasn’t. My stomach was still upset three days later.

But this isn’t about any of that. I’m just setting the context.

On the evening of New Year’s Day I cooked my girlfriend some dinner whilst she read the paper. The Guardian’s magazine was full of helpful advice about how to live a prosperous and healthy 2011. It was the usual pointedly appropriate mix of drink less, eat more healthily, do more exercise, make time for life rather than just work. One section discussed cutting down on our media, the never-ending ways in which we are plugged in the world. We should, it argued, make sure we are connected, but with how people really look as well as their profile pictures.

‘I gave up Facebook last year,’ she said. ‘It was surprisingly easy. I might do that again.’

Self-denial has never featured high up my list of ways to be entertained, but, without thinking, I said: ‘I wonder what I could give up.’

‘Beer,’ she replied without hesitation. ‘Or,’ she gave the matter some more consideration, ’alcohol generally?’

‘Now, let’s not be silly.’

But the more I thought about it, the more it appealed. I can be a contrary bugger at times and there was something about the social experiment aspect that would be interesting.

(Plus, you know, I need material for these things to come from somewhere. Ah, my life: Nothing but a vehicle for your entertainment.)

‘Yeah, right,’ guffawed my Kiwi friend, when I initially touted the idea. ‘You know what they say, David? Only those with a problem have to completely abstain.’

Yes, thank you, but this isn’t about problems. I do not have a problem with alcohol. I frequently don’t drink. I rarely drink during the day under any circumstances, simply because I find it difficult to then get anything else done. I don’t race home from the office craving a beer. I am not one of those people I see around, the woman in the power-dressed stripped business suit nipping at a hipflask as the seven-thirty morning commute train arrives in London Bridge, or the scabby guy with the burst blood vessels in his cheeks picking up cans of Strongbow Black when I collect my Observer from the newsagents early on a Sunday.

But I am a habitual drinker. Whilst it’s not as though I’m churning my way through four times the recommended limit every week, I do enjoy my drink. Going to the pub forms the foundation of my social activity. When I haven’t seen a friend for a while I always suggest we meet for a beer. I enjoy nice wine with a meal. I confess I do that thing which supposedly marks the alcoholic from the casual boozer - I drink alone. I take pleasure in a beer or a glass of wine or a whisky and water after an evening writing. Ultimately, my sub-conscious associates relaxing, down time, allowing space for my thoughts, chilling out, whatever you want to call it, it comes with an alcoholic drink.

But the thing is, these are all my choices. I know that I don’t have to do any of these things. I don’t have a physical yearning to imbibe? I don’t believe that I have a mental crux that makes social interaction impossible without lubrication. I don’t think I’d be bored if I didn’t drink.

Yet as I wrote about music and got on with life Lent got closer and closer and somewhere in the back of my mind I began to get slightly apprehensive: what would happen when I stopped drinking altogether? Would social occasions feel weird?
Would people look at me oddly, so defined am I with glass in hand? Would I simply hide away in my flat being somewhat boring? And crucially, for someone whose only non-alcoholic drinks of choice are ginger beer (but more than one these days gives me heartburn), tea, coffee and water, what the hell am I going to physically do with myself whilst those around me quaff till it dribbles out their ears?

I wrote the first draft of this blog on the first Sunday of Lent. The night before I went to a party. On paper it was one of those events where perhaps a drink or two might have eased things along slightly. A charity bash at my girlfriend’s parents’ place and whilst her family and friends are absolutely lovely and have made me feel welcome in their circles, I would still be surrounded by people I didn’t know that well. All of whom would be enjoying a drink. Somewhat to my surprise, it couldn’t have been easier. Time flowed on by and, although I found myself adrift and swollen with tap water whilst frequently having to politely decline her Father when he proffered the open wine bottle, the evening was thoroughly enjoyable.

The morning after, however, was weird. Initially everything was fine, but once in the shower I felt a ringing sting shoot through my head. As the afternoon wore on it dulled to a consistent throb, but even though I was five days sober I was the one with the headache the day after the party. At times life really isn’t fair.

Which left me to wonder, what will happen next? Will my much feared insomnia, fuelled by deep sleeps, late rises and too much caffeine return? Will I find myself suddenly much more productive or, as paradoxically I found trying to carve this blog out, lethargic in my writing? Leafing through my diary shows numerous events coming up where not drinking may be socially unacceptable, not least a stag do. Am I going to find myself shunned and ridiculed by a society where the consumption of alcohol, if not quite at the mythological levels splattered across the tabloids suggesting a high-street hell or Gomorrah Great Britain, is at least the common ground for most formal engagements?

Well, sod it. There’s only one way to find out. Keep dry and carry on.

Adventures in a record collection (part 6)

Inside the marquee we found ourselves shielded from the sharply biting sunshine, but instead smothered by a tight sweat. Dust filled the air and then lay down on our damp skin. At the far end the band were playing up a storm: A thrashed electro-punk sound almost collapsing into an acid-jazz wig out as the singer catapulted himself around the stage with a sneer and the drummer pounded the skins like they were going to beat him to death.

We were there to see faux-Mississippi delta via Yorkshire blues men Gomez, but this spectacle was the warm-up act. The squawk faded into a mess of battered instruments and a final flourished kick of the microphone and stand, the tipping up of the drum kit and seeming ambivalent stalk off the stage. This was music as gestures, as statement of intent. Hell, it might even mean something.

‘That was amazing,’ my Kiwi friend gushed. ‘Who were they again?’

‘No idea,’ I replied somewhat staggered. All around us the same questions were being asked: Who? Where? What?

Later, with the aid of the internet I learned that they were from Los Angeles, they were called Funeral Party and nine months later the dice have thrown up their debut album, The Golden Age of Knowhere.



Ten years or so, an aspiring visual artist said to me something about needing to be successful now. Right this minute. The implication being that artists who didn’t make it young were never going to make it; only with youth would you have something new to say. With age you become more accepting of the establishment. Life, in the end, wears you down.

In this instance, they were explicitly referring to visual artists, but I think it’s something that could, maybe, be applied to all art forms. Certainly music, with the possible exceptions of jazz, classical and opera, would seem to suggest so.



Perhaps it’s just because so-called youngsters buy more music and are inclined to buy something made by people their own age. Were we more interested in elevating our peers to positions of grandeur because then it felt more feasible that we could do it too? David Baddiel thinks that there no more heroes to be found in the arts. He argues that an excessively large critique market means that the equivalent of Ezra Pound pointing out James Joyce was a genius will never happen again. There are too many people with access to an audience (ahem) who’ll poo-poo any such proclamation. But the young don’t really know this. They haven’t been saddled with too much expectation being dashed too often.

Perhaps youth also brings with it a bravery to be different, to be innovative, to throw fucking rule book out the window and play what you need to hear or say or make rather than just what needs to sell to cover your mortgage repayments and keep you stocked up with nice wine.

There’s a notion in music writing of the difficult second album syndrome. The idea that the incendiary debut is almost impossible to follow up because there are now fans with expectations to meet without just repeating the trick, there is a profile to adhere to. Oh, and because under pressure from those same fans and the traditional money end of the business the record needs to be written, recorded, produced and released in a year whilst still promoting the debut, and so the band don’t have the luxury of time that helped the first’s gestation. They don’t have the freedom to hone the new songs by performing them live and to write and rewrite. They just have to do it.

This lack of fear to make the shapes and sounds that rest in your head, I guess, was what my artist friend meant. Age brings caution.

Common consensus seems to suggest that writers are different. As a general rule, writers are expected to be older. They are supposed to use the benefit and experiences of the life they have lived to write new ones for everyone else. Maybe it is all a matter of perspective. Maybe the concept of youth just depends on which direction you’re looking in.

It’s an optimistic thought and feasible in that no-one ever talks about writers under twenty, do they? Granta’s best young British/American/Spanish writers’ issues are always popular and young always means those under forty. In the classic 1983 list all bar http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2005/feb/19/fiction.kazuoishiguroand Adam Mars-Jones were older than I am now. A similar list in the New Yorker last year threw up only one. The Telegraph, copying the Americans blatantly, came up with their own list and only had Evie Wyld younger, although Ross Raisin was born the same year (Goldsmiths alumni both, by the way).

This is all reassuring. Sort of. As another rejection letter lands on the door mat, I can tell myself that there is still time to get it right. But sometimes it still feels like there’s so much stuff my head, so many scraps of notes and plot outlines and fragments of dialogue that I am simply running out of time to find people to read them.

Because writers are young too. For every David Abbott only coming to pick up a pen once life is mostly through there is someone like the hugely talented Amy Sackville who was just twenty-eight when the Stillpoint was published last year. Or Joshua Ferris who was thirty-three when Then We Came To The End persuaded me there was little point trying to write the perfect office experience novel because he’d just done it. He was the same age as when Ali Smith when Free Love and Other Stories came out. Ernest Hemingway was just twenty-seven when The Sun Also Rises was published and F. Scott Fitzgerald was just twenty-four when he held his first edition of This Side of Paradise. Neither of them had quite as much time as they may have expected. That’s the problem with life. You never quite know how long it’ll be.

Compared to the Arctic Monkeys being seventeen with a number one album they all seem positively ancient. Maybe it’s all about how old you feel.

You know what, I have no idea how old Funeral Party are. They might be in their late twenties or early thirties. They might not. It doesn’t really matter. In the end, it’s about the sound. My Kiwi friend and I went to see them again, making an active decision to check them out this time when they played Cargo in Shoreditch recently. Perhaps, forewarned they simply weren’t as surprising, but it didn’t feel quite the same.



As the crowd bounced and punched the claustrophobic air in the catacombs of the railway arches and the singer stared at his disjointed hand clutched the remains of the tambourine and said ‘I think I broke my thumb’, I glanced around and felt by far the oldest person there. Not because I wasn’t enjoying myself. I was. Not because I didn’t get airborne with the same enthusiasm as everyone else. I did. But because when they sang about revolution and changing of the world for the better through hedonism and ideals I couldn’t help but be objectively distant. They weren’t singing to me. They were singing to youth, to belief.

So, are Funeral Party going to be the next big thing? Are they heralding in a new era of music? Don’t be silly. Of course they’re not. They’re just a band. A good one, sure, but just a band. They do make a glorious racket, though.

Adventures in a record collection (part 5)

This was a long time ago. Half a lifetime ago, in fact. Back when the world was somewhat different, but, in many ways, exactly the same. It was in the run up to the end of school. Not just the end of a school year, but GCSEs and the moment we’d walk out of the school doors for the very, very last time. The time of being isolated and miserable by puberty had passed. It was the point at which life could start properly.

On Radio 1, which still mattered then, Chris Evans was kicking the establishment away. We hadn’t quite figured out what a nob he was, but compared to the traditional Smashie and Nicie DJs he was a rebel. He was cool. No less than when he extolled us, the young and empowered, to buy a record, to buy a single that was new and exciting and dynamic about us and them and life and the perils of vanity. We had to buy this record to prevent the housewife’s favourites, TV actors Robson and Jerome, from sitting pretty at number one with their bland cover of Unchained Melody.

It seemed as though music that was something more vibrant than Australian soap stars or novelty pop records that reeked so vilely was gate-crashing its way into the mainstream. Bands with guitars and drums who sang about the things that mattered rather than death cults or Nazi memorabilia had arrived. Or returned. Or, to be strictly accurate, simply drifted onto our cultural radar, previously blinkered by childhood. Anyway, they were bands for whom it was cool to part with our hard-earned cash. Money we’d gained stacking shelves in supermarkets, swiping credit cards in petrol stations and humping sacks of compost around garden centres. And so we bought the record, but it still only made it to number two. The nice chaps, with the big smiles and the chiselled chins and the safe, unchallenging material, who were managed by Simon Cowell, had triumphed.

See, things change. And then again, they don’t.

The song? Pulp’s Common People and that record along with its parent album, Different Class, was the sound of coming of age.



Britpop was a media phrase, something to sum up what it meant for Liam Gallagher and Patsy Kensit to appear sprawling on the cover of Time Magazine endorsing Cool Britannia. It was a handy way to clunk together bands from the UK who played guitar, but it was ineffectively narrow. Pulp were never Britpop. They were never Menswear or Cast or Sleeper or the Bluetones or fucking Shed ‘we’re so cool we can piss on the floor of the Cardiff Student Union Bar’ Seven. Which isn’t to say I didn’t, at the time, like those bands. I did, for I was young and they were a genre that I could associate with. Something cool I actually liked, that made me part of a socially acceptable herd.

Sorry, but I was sixteen.

Yet, it was a fleeting thing. The majority of Britpop bands have faded. Their music was of that moment at the end of the century when for the first time in twenty-five years it seemed that youth might be worth living after all. In 2011, Blur’s Damon Alban seems to have turned himself into some sort of twenty-first century Renaissance man dabbling in everything from pop-hip-hop to dub and Chinese opera, keeping each new release interesting at least. The Manic Street Preachers are in some sort of late-period revival, Radiohead continue to hide in their own little bubble and Oasis have finally realised that they’re never going to write a song as good as Don’t Look Back in Anger and have, thankfully, gone away. And that’s it. All the others, the one-time new generation, have become the past and either given up or are hawking records on their own labels and playing gigs to nostalgic thirty-somethings.



But, Pulp? Pulp were always too smart to be real Britpop. Their music was informed by disco and the need to dance rather than to give surly nods of the head. They were from the North yet not blokish; they were a little bit cheeky but not from Essex. They had been together over ten years and were already in their thirties. They defied all the metrics that should have placed them in the Britpop camp, but still lazy journalists dumped them in there all the same.

Despite tunes that now feel irresistible, at sixteen I was still too morbidly self-conscious, still too concerned what anyone else thought about me, to swing my hips without serious inebriation greasing the way along. So whilst the music did have that physically buoyant lift to it, the real reason I feel hopelessly in love with this album was – oh, how delightfully teenage, how typically Holden Caulfield of me – the lyrics. Jarvis Cocker’s wry observations of mid-nineties Britain’s with all its shams and hidden perversions and delighted oblivions of sex and hedonism were eye-opening and, instantly, it was as though I’d been waiting for someone to explain so succulently how the world worked.

The belter of an opening song, Mis-shapes, summed up the teenager suburban experience perfectly: “Oh, we don’t look the same as you/We don’t do the thing you do/But we live round here too…/…the future’s owned by you and me…/…we want your homes/We want your lives/We want the things you won’t allow us/We won’t use guns, we won’t use bombs/We’ll use the one thing we’ve got more of/And that’s our minds.”
It’s about knowing you’re cleverer, more grounded to the masses than those in power with wealth. It’s about resentment. It’s about none of those things. It mocks anyone who thinks it might be.

Cocker sneered at society’s divisions and, in particular, the Britpop trend of slumming it in a safe way, of pretending to be down and out when the reality of a council estate would probably have terrified the members of Space. And in-between he took the album’s brain and gave it a heart, albeit a disturbed one. He mixed in hefty doses of confused sex. In Pencil Skirt, I Spy, Live Bed Show and Underwear he doesn’t sing about making love or wooing a girl, but about the sordidness of affairs, how to wield control in relationships and the way sex fades from love over time. At sixteen, I don’t think I really understood any of this, but was content to snigger then scowl when he warned “I’ve had your mother twice and now I’m working on your Dad” or “take your year in Provence and shove it up your arse.”

Indeed even the more conventional narratives are anything but: Disco 2000 is a tale of teenage romance unfulfilled and the lingering obsession preventing future relationships from being successful setting to a thrusting guitar that guarantees the dancer going airborne at the final “Oh let’s meet up…”. Something Changed is about two people ending together by chance and then being, possibly, too idle to change again; people smothered by the easy option.



Leaving aside Cocker’s particular perversions, the charting of society’s hypocrisies is the staple of much great music. Disillusionment with the norm, as we’ve previously discussed, pushes people into bands, but it also appears in the writings of great novelists. Sometimes they are young and sometimes they are looking back across life with the experience of years, but the scope of the novel allows deeper and broader examination of the world’s ills than a three minute pop song.

I think that when I first wanted to write this was the sort of thing that passed through my tiny brain. I wanted to change the world with words. I wanted to draw people’s attention to the flaws in society that only I could see.

Sorry, but I was sixteen.

Instead, I am, I think, on more solid ground with the twisted complexities of relationships. Of course, being currently unpublished, I am far from the great novelist I once daydreamed of being, rather than revise for my exams.

Charles Dickens, however, probably was a great novelist. I remain hesitant since I’ve always struggled slightly with Dickens' tomes, but it isn’t arguable that he carved an immensely successful career out of informing society of its forgotten children and the peril of the wealth divide. The myths he painted still hang over London. Dickens’ reportage, or his invented archetypes, have dug their way into the city’s fabric.

Evelyn Waugh played it more for laughs, but his humour was bitterly sharp and double-edged. Those lampooning were as fallible as the lampooned. George Orwell kept it straight, but even he corrupted his work by deliberately seeking out the scummiest, seediest elements to report upon. The scandalous misery he found amongst Wigan life was highlighted by the big authorial finger pointing down from the heavens.

Kingsley Amis kicked the class system in the nuts until it puked, but in Cocker’s lyrics little has changed since the days of Lucky Jim. It’s just been rebranded; people born to positions still sit at the top of the pile. And again, little changes sixteen years later.

In the twenty-first century writers such as JM Coetzze, Aleksander Hemon and Caryl Philips address similar issues. They offer less all-encompassing visions than, for example, Leo Tolstoy who tried to map the entirety of Imperial Russia’s inequities. Instead, they spike their target and take a piercing outsider’s view as they drift through life; seeing with clarity the puppet master’s strings of society that those on the inside can all too easily ignore. Their texts are elegant framings of the world, less trying to force change, but content to shine a great big searchlight on it and let the gaps speak for themselves.

Similarly, Different Class’s finest moment is in the gap between songs. At the frantic futility of the penultimate track’s “Now, now that you’re free, what are you going to be?...Is this the light of a new day dawning? A future bright that you can walk in? No, it’s just another Monday morning, you got to do it all over again” when the song’s energy collapse in on itself and from the burnt out ashes of dreams torn down by reality, Cocker turns and says: “Hey, you made it.” The world is crap. To borrow a phrase from another band, Modern Life is Rubbish, but once you realise that and once you find people who feel the same then you can start to rebuild. You can find the fights that are worth winning and change, at least, yourself for the better.

You can grow up.

Or just waggle your bottom at Michael Jackson.

Adventures in a record collection (part 4)

The law of averages always meant I was going to roll dice and come up with a tricky one.

Which isn’t to say this is a bad album or even a remotely embarrassing one. Musically and lyrically it is sensational, it’s just that, well, maybe everything that could be said about Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On has already been said.



Gaye started his musical career as part of the Motown machine churning out lover-man ballads in the suburban Detroit studio basement owned by Berry Gordy. Motown’s plan to rule the American airwaves was going to plan and singer after singer, fuelled by the Funk Brothers tight grooves, laid down vocal s in the snakepit. Gaye was just another cog. His voice was just another instrument, no different to bass or drums.

It was just another way to tell stories about juvenile love and quickly forgotten heart-break that would appeal to the wallets of the young.

But it was his talent for duets that made him stand out. Big swelling, rhythm and soul numbers with lyrics that went to and fro declaring everlasting adoration for a succession of female partners propelled Gaye up the charts time and again and none so powerfully than as with Tammi Terrill.

When Terrill died of a brain haemorrhage in 1970, Gaye sank into a black depression. Already a surprisingly reserved man for a pop star (he hated performing live), he tumbled through a funk markedly different from the sort the band used to jam out. Demons chased his soul. His brother was in Vietnam. The murder of Martin Luther King and the subsequent riots in Chicago and Washington and Baltimore, Boston too were it not for only James Brown’s passionate performance keeping the crowds in the auditorium instead of out burning the streets down. All these wounds were raw. The USA was adrift and Gaye, depressed and confused, found its pulse.



I have no personal anecdotes to tell you about What’s Going On. It hasn’t intruded in my life in that way. The only thing I can think of is around the time, possibly even the same day, I first bought it and played it on repeat whilst stripping down my bedroom, preparing to leave the city at the end of University. Maybe that’s why. Maybe, somewhere in my subconscious, I automatically associate it with the end.

Influenced by the troubles around him, Gaye wrote a state of the nation address with a smooth funky back drop. His vocals are slick and yet catching on his heart at the same time. They soar over lush strings and swaggering bass that even today sounds the right side of dated. The emotions the record explores are complex; the narratives deep and far reaching, each song can touch the listener in a different way. It is both intensely personal and universal. And yet it was only released after protracted disagreement with Gordy who felt it was too political, missing the point that really the album is about Gaye’s grief for a world that wasn’t proving to be as wonderful as it had once promised.

In many ways, I think, this is the better way to write about real events, to make it personal and push the listener or reader or watcher to find themselves or the life they know in there too. William Skidelsky, writing in the Observer recently, bemoaned the abundance of films recreating real events: The King’s Speech, 127 Days, The Social Network, the upcoming Jack Kerouac biopic, Where the Road Ends. Or rather, to be more accurate, not that they exist, for vibrant insightful biography is a crucial part of our wider culture, but more he despaired at the instant and universal acclaim they seem to get. As though, by being truthful they are automatically more worthy than something which just makes shit up.

Whilst, I think they’re good films, he has got a point and it happens in literature as well. Indeed it can be traced all the way back to Shakespeare’s histories, political arse licking and spin doctoring each and everyone. But outside of violent regime change myth making, ever since Truman Capote’s toweringly brilliant In Cold Blood novelists seem to have been increasingly poaching narratives from real life, as though not having to concentrate so closely on plot will release them to explore the human dynamics. Simon Mawer in the Glass Room doesn’t have to worry about the setting for his narrative since he borrows a real Czech art deco house to place it. Jonthan Littell’s research heavy The Kindly Ones can focus on incidental detail without having to worry about the logistics of how the Nazis might lose the war. John Banville can focus on his characters’ failings in The Untouchable rather than whether their secrets will have to come out or not.

Okay, so it may not be as overt as in the films mentioned. Banville even changes the names involved (although we know it’s the Cambridge spies). They are all very admirable books, but somehow I can’t help but wonder if they’d have been even better with greater invention. Just going with the narrative flow; trusting the audience to have faith in the creator.

Besides, where does it stop? Capote’s experiences of writing In Cold Blood even became a film in their own right. Circles around and around constricting our knowledge and understanding spheres.

Yes, it’s important to examine these building blocks of our existence; these examples of the extremes of humanity’s triumphs and failings, coupled with the microcosm of self, there is much we can learn from them, but not at the expense of pure invention. The ability to conjure something out of nothing, to externalise our own individual concerns, hopes and failings into a mythic construct is a precious talent. It enables people to see beyond the simplistic, the straightforward narrative and to search out their own reflection from within.

After all, the reason that What’s Going On still sounds relevant forty years later is its lack of specifics. Urban strife, financial meltdown, ecological catastrophe, hopelessness in the soul of a country, distant war few want or understand? It could be tomorrow, couldn’t it?

Adventures in a record collection (part 3)

Another London park; another hot summer afternoon only this time the sunshine comes after the morning’s thick clouds have been stirred away. Like the crassly spoken words that came too, they have crashed under their own weight, been eased to one side by the music and now all that remains is the dried up remnants in the air. Over the afternoon the music will crank up, build through stages towards the crescendo, but at that moment it was still preparing its ascent, still yawning in the golden light.

The main attraction was elsewhere, somewhere down by the bars and the cluster of people, just in sight of the main stage, easing back into the cracked grass to receive the tightly wrapped cigarette papers. I was among the outskirts. Just me and a couple of dozen other keen souls, entrapped by the stripped back sound of hard heels on wooden floors.

At the end of the set the two lead singers, sisters, came down amongst the crowd and autographed copies of their albums. I handed over seven quid for a copy of their debut and they duly scrawled their names on the front. I walked away starring down at its strangeness. Written in tight red biro, as though from a scratch, needled in between the half cut face of the artwork, it said: ‘To Dave, love Rachel and Becky’ as though it was a joint present from my sister and an ex-girlfriend.

The dice haven’t chosen that record. They’ve chosen the one which was the reason I was there in the first place: Rachel Unthank and the Winterset - The Bairns.



It’s another folk record, but a very English one. Or, to be more precise, a Northumbrian one. The songs resound with the north-east’s lost past. They echo a clichéd mix of abandoned mines, coasts where the wind could carry you out to sea or crash you against the footholds of a castle and gruff hardy types who like a drink and the things that are best left to the dark. In many ways, everything about them is deeply unfashionable. The girls in the group refreshing defy the televised notion of a female music star yet still there is something beguiling about the Unthank sisters. The flushed out toned down photography of Becky Unthank stiffly seated in what could be a corseted reinforced dress atop a renaissance chair reflects the music they make: Beautifully aching music filled with remote longing.

The album is filled with songs of domestic violence and lost virginities; stories woven with sex and the demons found in drink, all sweetly harmonised over piano, fiddle and the occasional rhythmic stomp. These are songs with subject matter timeless and sung in voices that sound like they come from beyond, but are simultaneously lush and hallowed so they could be either from above or below. They are mixture of whole songs and concocted lullabies, snippets of traditions caught on a dusty old tape on the final breath of the drunk in the corner by the fire.



The only girl group thing about them is that they mainly play cover versions. Or, to be more accurate, aside from two group compositions, one written for them and a cover of Bonnie Prince Billy, the rest are traditional folk songs arranged by the group. Reinterpretations of songs sung for generations, but not as radical reworkings as, for example, the Pogues did to Irish country music. The songs are still grounded, still sunk deep into the earth. Rather than gut, they remodel with craft, they restore glory. They inherit.

Indeed why should they feel the need to write new material? When the music is as rich, unexplored and deeply satisfying as this, there could well be no other songs ever crafted than the fifteen on this album. All music, in the end, derives from itself. It’s all just progression built upon what has been before, all the way back to sticks on stones in the dust.

Classical literature tradition also suggests that all narrative comes from itself.
After all, there are only seven truly original story types. Not plots, but pure story types: The Quest; Voyage and Return; the Rebirth; Comedy; Tragedy; Overcoming the Monster; Rags to Riches.

A touch simplistic? Well, maybe, and certainly comedy and tragedy are pretty wide spheres. Aristole defined comedy as showing people to be worse than they are and tragedy as showing them to be greater. PG Wodehouse’s books are called comedy not just because it is hilarious, but because they on focus Bertie Wooster’s failings, even though in doing so they accidentally reveal his strengths too. Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables is a tragedy because Valjean, when he strides through the barricades to catch the collapsing world, is more than we could ever hope to be.

But still, these are building blocks rather than absolutes. We can blend recipes to concoct new dimensions of the originals, yet the core remains. The irrefutables.
These are the parts of life worth writing about.

Let’s take some random examples from my bookshelves:

William Boyd’s A Good Man in Africa may be very funny, but technically it’s a rebirth story – taking the central character as broken as they can possibly be and allowing that moment of epiphany when they start to return. Anne Enight’s The Gathering is a probably a tragedy, but it could also be a voyage and return. The family spreads far and wide and only stumbles home in mourning. Graham Greene’s the Power and the Glory is a quest for salvation. The whisky priest grapples with his own soul over that of his nation. Will Self’s Great Apes is an overcoming the monster tale, only in this instance is the beast within. Michael Chabon’s Kavlier and Clay, despite its flaws, is a rags to riches and back down to the gutter and finally up to the spires again story with doses of comedy and tragedy to boot.

Curiously, browsing through my books for this exercise I notice a couple of things. Is it just me or have rags to riches stories gone out of fashion in the Western world? Or, at least, outside of America? Is there so little mileage to be gained from people inching from one level of comfort to a slightly more squidgy version? Or have we decided that writing about wealth and the acquisition of it is nothing more than crass? I suspect that this is more a British embarrassment over discussing wealth. We’ve too much of a tendency to be equally jealous of those both above and below us, too focused on illusionary green grass, to consistently enjoy such stories.

I appear to own a prevalence of rebirth novels, which possibly reflects my own interests and writings. The novel that I can currently touting around is a rebirth of sorts. There’s certainly the crushing finality of realisation where we all went wrong. Or at least, I hope there is. The work that I’m trying to cultivate into something greater, an action that appears to be tragic in itself, is perhaps a mix of rebirth, voyage and return, rags to riches and overcoming the monster. Perhaps one will exert its dominance over the others, but which will only come clear in the writing of it.

Short stories are, perhaps, harder to categorise. Their brevity, their necessary focus on the moment, the turn, means that they struggle to take more than one story element and indeed there is insufficient space for enough emotional development to take on the entirety of, say, a quest story. All they can do is hint. Paradoxically bigger more complex works fit more easily into one of these silos.
But maybe that’s the big bluff. Maybe the complexities are just in our imaginations; what we expect from two hundred plus pages. Once you strip out the narrative twists, the self-consciously stylised imagery, the slight-of-hand literary thesis all we’re left with is the story. One of the seven moulds, waiting to be cast; to be turned into something new. Strangely, despite all the traditions bled into The Bairns, it is on the composition written especially for them that I found the most emotionally satisfying. Fareweel Regality is perfectly placed as the penultimate track. It follows on the back of the dusty wail for Ma Bonny Lad. There’s a half breath of a pause and then an almost, dare I say it, gleeful in its own melancholy fiddle strikes up before Rachel raises her head from the beaten ground and softly sings something new from something familiar.

Adventures in a record collection (part 2)

The ground of Hyde Park was a loose brown that eased into the air; dust particles glinted in the afternoon sun that drifted across the horizon. From the far side of the barricades a grinding bass thud echoed under the soil and up the back of my calves.

‘Yeah, so we’re going in because David wants to see one of the support acts,’ my Kiwi friend trilled down her phone. ‘I don’t know, Gas-something.’

‘Gaslight Anthem,’ I said and glanced at my reflection in her oil slick aviators. I shimmered back at myself.

‘Gaslight Anthem. No, I’ve never heard of them either. They sound old though. Because David’s really old.’

‘Hey,’ I interrupted: ‘I’m only four years older than you.’

‘Whatever. Catch us up, okay? Laters.’

We made our way through the barriers and picked a path through the throngs sitting in the heat, letting the music wash into their sweat. Scuffed footsteps, those that tapped along to the beat, caused more dirt disturbance and already I could feel the clogging of my nostrils. The thick frantic drums throbbed along my breastbone behind the a brisk guitar that caught on the summer’s breath.

‘Hey,’ she said and turned to glance at me: ‘They’re actually quite good’

Seven months later in the biting chill of my flat, the Gaslight Anthem’s second album, The ’59 Sound, is chosen by the dice.



I don’t remember how I got into the Gaslight Anthem. This album just seemed to appear in my collection. I don’t remember buying it nor the first time I listened to it, but it must have been sometime before Easter 2009. That weekend, I picked Architect-Steve up to drive to Snowdonia for some hiking. The rattling chains of guitars pelted out of the stereo until, after a while, Steve said:

‘I haven’t heard music like this for a while.’

‘Music like what?’

‘I think I’m getting too old for angry young men with guitars.’

But a lot of great music has been made my angry young men with guitars desperate to change the world. It’s the classic route of rebellion from the late fifties to the future. It is fuelled by the accessibility of the guitar, the band-as-a-gang structure inspiring people to riff on how they’d rule the world to get the girl and step out from the shadow of the dreaded adulthood they’d imagined. The band, at least in a youngster’s eyes, is the opposite of their parents' choices.

In the band, you never need truly grow up.

Punky Springsteen is the easiest way to describe the Gaslight Anthem. They sound a little like a twenty-first century version, which would have been a coincidence with last week’s entry, although frontman Brian Fallon claims that he’d didn’t really listened to the Boss until after forging his own band’s sound. He claims a greater inspiration from Joe Strummer. A song from a different album is called I’da Called You Woody, Joe, an allusion to the Clash singer's earlier pseudonym which, I guess, works well for those who like links under the lines.

The comparison with Springsteen’s sound whilst accurate is also lazy. Sure, the Gaslight Anthem roar tales of suburban heartbreak and heroes in the Boss’ hometown of New Jersey, but where Bruce’s music has a soaring sickly epic haze to it, a arc of relentless inevitability, confident in its own grandeur, the Gaslight’s racket is more ramshackle and seemingly accidental. The guitars are quicker, more soaked with the late seventies, and the characters are more beat-up, desperate and hopeless. Ordinary Joes failing at life without the romanticism that everything can be redeemed by the open road. It’s never going to get better than bearable for the ciphers packed into these songs where triumph is the refrain “ain’t supposed to die on a Saturday night” and Fallon groans like the trouble is sinking deep into his guts: “See, I been here these twenty-eight years, pounding sweat beneath these wheels, we tattooed lines beneath our skin.”

Twenty-eight? Pah. It’s absurd and yet, I believe him when he says enough is enough.



‘I love their lyrics,’ said my Kiwi friend bopping gently under the open sky.

‘Yeah, this one’s great,’ I replied as they ripped into the next number. ‘A song of broken hearts, sailors down on the damp docks getting new tattoos, broken down iron framed American cars and no way out.’

‘Yup, check, check and check. All clichés presents and correct.’

But there’s a reason why clichés are as such. They really do ring true. And that familiarity allows you to know what the rules of the game are. There’s an argument, maybe, for writers having a consistency of voice and theme that allows the reader to know in whose hands they are placing their need to be entertained. I don’t mean rewriting the same dross over and over, but crafting something that reeks with the author, something that reflects identities.



Graham Greene’s characters are, in the main, parts of each other. They change over the course of his career, but they are nearly all haunted by lost love with a penchant for whisky, a struggle for the normality of marriage and a willingness to visit brothels; their principles are flooded with emotional swelling that thrases against their otherwise pragmatic nature and then there's the never ending shiver of unrealised Catholic guilt. Querry from A Burnt Out Case could well be a worn down Bendix from the End of the Affair; Farnworth in England Made Me could grow into Brown from the Comedians or maybe even Fowler in the Quiet American. If things had ended differently, it isn’t that hard to see Scobie from The Heart of the Matter growing blindly into Forntum in The Honorary Consul.

And, anyway, aren’t they all just exhalations of the author? Just bits of himself that Greene expelled and breathed back to life on the page?

Recovering alcoholic, Raymond Carver, whose wife was crucial in his survival, writes of broken down drunks, almost always in retrospect and with a hinted mixture of regret and longing. His characters swill through heartbreak, their love crying out to be rescued or rescue from the tedium of life, but all that remains is the descent into numbness. That single reason to exist – the last escape.

Ernest Hemingway, Martin Amis, F. Scott Fitzgerald, JG Ballard, Philip Roth, Saul Bellow, Gore Vidal... They all do it. Their works are all stuffed with narrators and characters who you can't help but think you've met somewhere before.

I wonder whether my own characters and stories are beginning to have this consistency. The misfits who populate my writings are almost certainly going to be some sort of emotional crisis, or complexity – an interaction between their former, current or potential lover that doesn’t quite fit the norm. They like a drink. Perhaps too much. They are frequently based in, but rarely from, London. They may be weighed down by their middle-classness or struggling in having to come to terms with the surprising end of youth. Is this bad writing or does it give me a solid base from which to deviate? Is what I’ve previously claimed to be laziness in inventing detail instead cementing a control from which the story can be spun in any which way I choose?

It is, however, important to remember that whilst these may be my characters’ obsessions they are not all of me. Greene’s characters are clearly infused with who he was, but it doesn’t mean they are complete representations. Despite the parallels it is a mistake to read his work as a direct confession. All the writers above, whilst almost certainly possessing the male vanity need to fictionalise the self by inventing shit up to show off, don't get away with it that easily. So if in the end it is all made up, then there are still reasons for the shroud.

As The Gaslight Anthem point out to us, on Here’s Looking At You, Kid, the things we say always have a reason; the lies layered in our fiction suggest something else. The characters are just that – caricatures. The real is more mundane. Or, just occasionally, more exciting.

“You can tell Gail if she calls,
Tell her… That I’m famous for all these rock and roll songs.
And even if that’s a lie
She should’ve given me a try.”

Adventures in a record collection (part 1).

I am, although it pains me to admit it, somewhat stuck. I find myself wedged between different projects. Above me, pressing down with a frustrated heaviness is what looks suspiciously like a finished manuscript for a novel, which I am slowly sending out to agents and wincing when I come home from work to find the inevitable ‘thanks, but no thanks’ compliment slip on the bottom step. To either side like gobby yoofs on the evening train are half a dozen aborted short stories that were never going anywhere interesting. And pushing up from underneath my feet, fearful of being trampled all over, I seem to have the fledging shoots of something else: An idea.

It is an idea that’s been rattling around my head for a few years and found its missing heart in the summer of 2009, right when I was pounding the keyboard in full flight for that probably completed manuscript that scowls at me every time I fire up the computer. At the time I was too busy to work on it and so scraps of notes went in the ‘ideas’ folder. That tends to be how it goes, I guess. Productivity equals more stuff being produced, like a chain reaction of fictional ideas.

So, on one hand I’ve been hanging out with these new people for a long time. On the other, they’re like strangers. Or more like celebrities. People I know superficial things about, their publicised highlights, but I’ve been sat down next to them at a dinner party (in some weird universe) and now I’m nervously trying to understand the real them. It takes time for they are sensitive souls and prone to going into a silent sulk if I press to hard.

In other words, I’m writing as though my fingers were coated in lead. Very, very slowly.

Still, I think to myself, productivity equals more stuff. Perhaps I should be more consciously trying to reboot the chain reaction. Perhaps it is time to return to the blog.

Except… Except… Ngh. I can’t think of anything to say! I don’t even have many stories of bizarre London roaming to recount, or none that I want to share anyway. Sorry.

And yet, this was the original idea for the blog. Its original function was to be a way to kick start my brain into putting words down on paper.

So: Emergency conversation piece one-oh-one. Music.

Let’s write something about music. Let’s write something about music I love. Let’s write something about music I love and how it feeds into my writing. I think I may be slightly unusual in that I almost always, except when close editing, write to music. Lavinia Greenlaw says that, despite being obsessed with music, she can’t create with it on; that she needs to hear the poetic rhythms of her prose in her head. I’m not that sort of writer. I’m probably not that good a writer, but regardless even when I have turned the stereo off the songs just play on as shadowy remnants of tunes heard earlier. Choosing the right record, setting the right tone, has become part of my preparation.

So, let’s write about that.

Except that’s a bit easy. Let’s make it harder. Okay, you up for this? I’m going to choose a record at random and try and find something interesting to say about it. I am going to roll three dice. One determines the record stack in my flat, the second the shelf of that stack, the third the number of CDs in from the left.

(This could be really painfully embarrassing).

Huh. Interesting. Okay, there’s something I can say about Billy Bragg and Wilco: Mermaid Avenue.



This is a slightly unusual album in that British folk/protest singer Billy Bragg was invited by American folk legend Woody Guthrie’s daughter to record songs using some of her father’s unused lyrics set to contemporary music. Mermaid Avenue was where Guthrie lived in Brooklyn during the late forties and again ten years later when his career was all but over. The fact that the record is named after where he went to die might tell us quite a lot.

Guthrie was a principled recording artist in the thirties, frequently touting a guitar with the motto ‘This machine kills fascists’ either etched into the wood, or marked on a sticker and attached. He wrote Americana folk songs, including ‘This Land is our Land’, and broken ballads that drifted out of the dust bowl and dumped dried dirt into your ears. He lived a self-stylised hobo life criss-crossing the country, daringly associating with communists and somehow being both patriotic and disruptive to the state. But by the fifties he was barely able to play guitar, his coordination so wrecked by motor neuron problems. For twenty years he suffered from undiagnosed Huntingdon’s disease, variously being labelled as an alcoholic or a schizophrenic and the frustration at the unfairness of life was taken out on two wives who were eventually driven away (although the first returned to help him to the end).

By the time fan Bob Dylan tracked Guthrie down in the mid-sixties he was described as having ‘good and bad days’. There were days when he would talk enthusiastically to Dylan about music and messages and days when he wouldn’t understand what was happening to him. He eventually died in 1967 a echo of himself and outside of folk circles his influence waned. In the mid-nineties Nora Guthrie saw Billy Bragg, the bard of Barking, performing at a festival and invited him to record the project.

Daunted at having to reinterpret a hero’s musical legacy, Bragg called in alt-Country band Wilco and former 10,000 Maniacs vocalist, Natalie Merchant, to help soak up some of the emotion. Whilst they were to fall out over the project– Wilco’s bassist felt Bragg’s songs were overproduced – it is still a startling record; a concept album not about something but fuelled by something, by someone.

Whilst grounded in fairly safe folk-rock territory, the record oscillates between jocular rambunctiousness and woeful heartbreak. There are boisterous hints at seediness in Walt Whitman’s niece; heartbreaking simplicity in Birds and Ships; older-man perverseness over Ingrid Bergman; slightly sarcasm in Christ for President. Jeff Tweedy’s vocal on At my Window Sad and Lonely sounds like the last gasps of desperation over deceptively simple guitar barely in the same room. The fun almost rockabilly of Guess I Planted contrasts with the, again, meditative frustration at being locked out of your talent as age catches up in One by One.

It’s an album recorded in flushed out black and white, where the blacks are actually a faded brown, like tea stained paper or whisky, and the whites are nothing but mist.

As a (wannabe) writer I like the idea of trying to harness the ghost of someone else, an idol or a hero. The new piece that I’m playing with has a noir tinge to it, but also the hero is plagued with guilt. I am playing in the Graham Greene sandpit, taking everyone to a reimagining of Greeneland and I’m well aware of it. I'm challenging myself to wrestle down the enigma of Greene and funnel out words so utterly poised as his. It seems pretty unlikely, though. I’m not good enough.

When I take the mood of music, I often have a scene where the track plays through my fingers. It’s like in a film or a TV programme, there’s a soundtrack and often no-one’s saying anything, but it’s just a tracking shot establish mood. But because there is no soundtrack to words on paper, I have to try and convey that same mood through the tone and phrasing.

Years ago, I planned a short story which in my head featured a song from Mermaid Avenue, Way Over Yonder in a Minor Way, playing over, for want of a better phrase, the story’s credits. The point, at the end, when the written phrase pans out and the soundtrack starts. Sometimes I see my stories visually and then have to grapple how to put them into words. This was one of those occasions.

It is a marvellous song. Deceptively simply lyrics create a sense of yearning for something that never was. Bragg’s voice cracks with the ironic self-championing ‘ain’t nobody that can sing like me.’ It’s nothing to do with the tone or the tunefulness or even the soul of the voice. It was about Guthrie’s beliefs. The heart-felt intention not the delivery was what mattered and Bragg infuses it with a near mournful retrospective of a life’s disappointments.



This was in the spring of 2007. Tony Blair had yet to leave office, but it was becoming increasingly obvious he was going. I wondered how it must have felt to be one of those in ninety-seven who’d flooded him into power, who’d hung onto the coat-tails expected the revolution that never came. Would they feel betrayed? And the war was inescapable. How could they justify all the deaths to themselves? I played around with the idea of a civil servant, or a party member; someone at the heart of things and, now that it was over, they were left empty and drained and a useful nothing husk of man.

Consigned to failure.

This final scene would have had the protagonist shaking hands with someone and then walking away as the autumn leaves drifted down and the camera panned out and up into the sky, over the way in a minor way. I never did write that story. To an extent it was overshadowed by the final image. I couldn’t find the words to cram in the space of what I wanted to say, the bitter longing to try again. The rest of it never quite came together, but the final scene still sits in the ‘ideas’ file and whenever I hear that album it pops up in my mind.

Perhaps some day I’ll be able to find all the right things to say about regrets and how the past could have been; how the opportunities were missed and how life has a way of making it impossible to much other than life in the moment. Don’t put things off that you could do today for you might be incapable of doing them tomorrow.

Until then I’ll have this record to say it for me.

Or, as Tweedy gets to sing on Another Man’s Done Gone:
‘Maybe, if I hadn’t of seen so much hard feelings
I might not could have felt other people’s
So when you think of me, if and when you do,
Just say, well, another man’s done gone.’